Let the Great World Spin
by Colum McCann
Summary
On the morning of 7 August 1974, a man appears in the sky over lower Manhattan, walking a cable strung between the not yet loved Twin Towers, and the whole city looks up. McCann uses the walk, Philippe Petit's, though the novel never names him, as the axis for eleven narrators whose lives cross under it in the course of a day and its consequences.
At the centre is Corrigan, an Irish monk living in the Bronx projects, who keeps his door unlocked for the prostitutes around him, tends patients in a nursing home, and is driving Jazzlyn, a young mother of two, home from court when a car clips his van on the FDR and kills them both. From that crash the book radiates: Claire, a Park Avenue mother hosting a breakfast circle of women who have all lost sons in Vietnam; her husband, the judge who processes both the tightrope walker and Jazzlyn's mother Tillie in the same morning's arraignments; Tillie herself, whose confession from a prison cell is the novel's rawest chapter; Corrigan's brother; the artist in the other car; a Palo Alto phone phreak listening to the walk down a payphone line. A coda in 2006 follows Jazzlyn's daughter, grown, back to New York and to Claire, the judge's wife.
The tightrope stands for the whole design: the city as a web of nerve and luck, everyone walking it unknowingly.
Around three hundred and fifty pages.
Best for readers who want the New York ensemble novel at its most openhearted, grief and grace passed hand to hand across thirty years.
Historical Context & Significance
Let the Great World Spin won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2009 and the International Dublin Literary Award after it, and its reception fixed the reading McCann half intended: written by an Irishman long in New York, organised around the towers at their innocent beginning, it was received as the first great 9/11 novel to succeed by not being about 9/11 at all, the catastrophe present only as the reader's knowledge of what the skyline becomes. The Dublin judges called it a genuinely twenty first century novel that speaks to its time but is not enslaved by it; the New York Times called it electric.
Petit's 1974 walk had just returned to public memory through the documentary Man on Wire, and the two works now circulate together.
Colum McCann, who had written dancers, tunnel diggers and Roma poets, consolidated here the method of his career, empathy as structure, lives braided across class lines, and spent the standing it earned on Apeirogon and on Narrative 4, the story exchange nonprofit he co founded. This remains his signature book.